Poet and historian Carl Sandburg's "Memoir of a Proud Boy" imagines the last days of Don Magregor, a Socialist reporter who fought alongside striking Colorado coal miners. The Ludlow Massacre is described, including the death of Louis Tikas.

Vintage Colorado PoetryPoem of the WeekSeptember 19, 2005

Memoir of a Proud Boy

He lived on the wings of stormThe ashes are in Chihuahua.

Out of Ludlow and coal towns in ColoradoSprang a vengeance of Slavs miners, Italians, Scots, Cornishmen, Yanks.Killings ran under the spoken commands of this boyWith eighty men and rifles on a hogback mountain.

They killed swearing to rememberThe shot and charred wives and childrenIn the burnt camp of Ludlow,And Louis Tikas, the laughing Greek,Plugged with a bullet, clubbed with a gun butt.

As a home warIt held the nation a weekAnd one or two million men stood togetherAnd swore by the retribution of steel.

It was all accidental.He lived flecking lint off coat lapelsOf men he talked with.He kissed the miners' babiesAnd wrote a Denver paperOf picket silhouettes on a mountain line.

He had no mother but Mother JonesCrying from a jail window of Trinidad:"All I want is room enough to standAnd shake my fist at the enemies of the human race."

Named by a grand jury as a murdererHe went to Chihuahua, forgot his old Scotch name,Smoked cheroots with Pancho VillaAnd wrote letters of Villa as a rock of the people.

How can I tell how Don Magregor went?

Three riders emptied lead into him.He lay on the main street of an inland town.A boy sat near all day throwing stonesTo keep pigs away.

The Villa men buried him in a pitWith twenty Carranzistas.

There is drama in that point . . .. . . the boy and the pigs.Griffith would make a movie of it to fetch sobs.Victor Herbert would have the drums whirrIn a weave with a high fiddle-string's single clamor.

"And the muchacho sat there all day throwing stonesTo keep the pigs away," wrote Gibbons to the Tribune.

Somewhere in Chihuahua or ColoradoIs a leather bag of poems and short stories.